Get EA Books
Eager to learn more about EA at your own pace? Borrow a book from the EA NYUAD Book Exchange Program! Here are some of the books you can explore:
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If you are interested in receiving physical EA books such as Doing Good Better or The Life You Can Save for your event, please contact ea.nyuad@gmail.com. We are more than happy to send books to bright, intellectually motivated students who want to do the most good possible.
The Life You Can Save
Doing Good Better
The issue of Global Poverty is gigantic and it is pressing—but it can be solved. Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save argues in favor of this, showing how each of us could easily be contributing with a much greater amount of progress (and in fact, morally should) to work towards the end of global poverty.
The Precipice
We live in an extremely unfair world: over a billion people make less than $1.50 a day, an amount we might find ourselves using just to buy our coffee every day. Such an astonishing reality can be overwhelming. However, William MacAskill’s Doing Good Better lays out foundational principles that can help us see ways in which we can make the world a better place. This piece, more than a philosophical reflection, is a toolkit that enables us to use our power and privilege to tackle these current pressing issues and do immense good.
The Scout Mindset
Toby Ord’s The Precipice raises awareness on the pressing Existential Risks of humanity. Through convincing philosophical arguments, the author explores the science of subjects as climate change, artificial intelligence, nuclear war, or biological warfare and outlines possible strategies towards avoiding these catastrophes, pointing ways in which we can work towards saving humanity’s future.
We frequently reason in a way that justifies our personal behaviors and wishful thinking, in order to defend the ideas we most want to believe. To think more objectively, however, we need to steer from motivated reasoning into what Julia Galef denotes as "a Scout Mindset."
Unlike the soldier who is driven to fulfill their goal, the scout's mission is to map out the territory and the enemy's conditions as accurately as possible in order to have an efficient strategy—getting as close as possible to what would constitute an "objective truth." Through research and examples, Galef showcases in her book methods to train our emotional responses to be more objective and see the world more as it is than as we wish it to be.